Psalm 100
Let’s hear God’s word together.
This is Psalm 100, and it says, a Psalm for giving thanks. Make
a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth. Serve the Lord with
gladness. Come into his presence with singing.
Know that the Lord, he is God. It is he who made us and we are
his. We are his people and the sheep of his pasture. Enter his
gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. Give thanks
to him and bless his name for the Lord is good. His steadfast
love endures forever and his faithfulness to all generations. Amen. Tonight, we’ll end our
study of the psalms with Psalm 100, we’ll pick back up at 101
in a little while. But we also, landing on Psalm
100, get to the end of the kingship psalms that started at Psalm
93. So Psalm 93, you kind of skip
Psalm 94. It doesn’t really count as a
kingship psalm. And then pick up at 95 through 100. These are
the kingship psalms that tell us about God the king and have
us praise him as God is the king and give us different aspects
of who God is and what he has done for us. And so Psalm 100
is a good ending for us to land on. It’s also a good Psalm for
understanding worship, as many of these Psalms have been in
the recent weeks. So tonight we want to consider
Psalm 100. I don’t know about a lot of y’all,
maybe some of y’all have been in the same church all your life,
but somehow, someway I’ve been around the block. When I was
a little kid, first born and raised in church, we went to
a little church in Virginia called Village Presbyterian. It was
an old white frame building, old Presbyterian church, US,
a southern Presbyterian church congregation. The building was
old. It was a building that the architect
was Thomas Jefferson. It was in the south side of Virginia,
and it was across from the courthouse where Patrick Henry gave one
of his give me liberty or give me death speeches. One of the
ministers of that church in the 1800s was Mr. Alexander, who
if you look through your hymn book, had written a number of
the hymns that we sing. And this was an old congregation,
an old congregation by age. It was a historic congregation,
but it was an old congregation when we were there. Lots of generational
family membership, but it was old. It was traditional. It was
one of those old state congregations. There was an organ. And interestingly,
it was built before some of the cultural revolutions took place
in the United States. I didn’t know this till I went
back later as an older kid, but there was a balcony in the church
and there was a separate stairway into the balcony and that separate
stairway had a separate door outside and the slaves could
enter the church and go up their own stairway and into the balcony
where they could sit while the white congregation sat below. That’s an interesting piece of
history, isn’t it? That’s an interesting thing to
have seen as a child. Well, on from there, we moved
here to Burlington and we worshiped at another traditional Presbyterian
church. where there was a dark sanctuary,
there were stained glass, there was the organ, there was all
the tradition. And then from there, we got a little more maybe
hippie-like. Our family and many others left
the Southern Presbyterian denomination and started a church. It was
very non-traditional. It met in an old grocery store.
We sat in folded seats. There were all kinds of interesting
forms of music and worship over the years. There was southern
gospel, there was bluegrass, there was rock and roll music. There were also some Sundays
that were very traditional, but for most of my life, that was
what we experienced in Sunday on church, is a mix of everything. It was high church sometimes
and very low church at other times. And then in college, when
I went out on my own and had the choice, I found myself very
often in more high Presbyterian churches and then also came to
land in maybe what you might call the conservative, reformed
brand of church and worship. Then when Mandy and I were married,
we went down to Charlotte. We went for one year to a very
contemporary Presbyterian Church in America congregation. I think
I may have been the only person in the church, the only male,
who wore a sport coat, including the preacher. But we did that
for a year. And then we landed in the Associate
Reform Presbyterian Church. We landed at an old historic
congregation where there was traditional worship. And here
we are. But to say all that, to say, I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen a whole lot. Some of
you might think that I’m the way I am, and I’m the way I am,
and that’s the way it’s always been. But no, I’ve seen a good
bit. And it makes you think about
the principles of worship. It makes you think about the
convictions we ought to have about worship. And it also makes
you think about the specific practices we should put into
place in the worship. And if we look across the landscape
of church in America, even church in the world, You look at your
own experience, you look at the broad church in the United States,
you look at the church throughout human history, but you also look
at the church as it worships in heaven in the presence of
God. And the issue of style, the issue of context, the issue
of ways to worship, what’s right, who determines it, begins to
peel itself back and you begin to realize this is something
bigger than me. This is about who God is and
about what he desires. And Psalm 100 helps us see that. And so as we take a look at scripture,
We understand that God desires to be worshipped and that God
desires to be worshipped in the way He wants to be worshipped.
We saw that this evening as we read through the Ten Commandments.
The first four commandments deal with how we relate to God. I
am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of slavery, out of bondage I delivered you
and redeemed you. Therefore, no other gods. Therefore,
no graven images. Therefore, do not take my name
in vain. Therefore, remember my Sabbath
day and keep it holy. And so we begin to see that God
in scripture desires to be worshipped and he desires to be worshipped
in a very specific way. And so we begin to realize it’s
not about me and what I want, it’s about God and what He wants. And that’s a very opposite way
of thinking, isn’t it, to what we find in American culture. So hopefully a little glance
at Psalm 100 will help us to see a couple things. One is God
is our creator, redeemer, created us to worship Him, and He calls
us. to worship him. He made us to
worship him, but he also calls us to worship him. So a couple
ideas that pop up in Psalm 100. The first I want us to take note
of is that worship is a verb. Worship is action. There was a book written in 1992
by a man named Robert And he said, worship is not done to
us and worship is not for us, but it is done by us. And so worship is a verb. Remember
your junior high grammar class, your English grammar lessons.
Verbs show action. And so what does that mean for
us? It means worship is action on our part. Worship has a lot
of verbs. There are a lot of worship verbs
in the Bible. Just look at the ones from Psalm
100, come. Enter, make a joyful noise, serve the Lord, give thanks,
bless his name. If not, in every case, it’s almost
every case, these are imperatives. Y’all know what imperatives are,
right? Those are the verbs your mother used when she wanted something
done. Dinner is an imperative, right? It’s not a noun, it’s
an imperative. That means get in the house, it’s time to eat,
wash up, clean your hands, come to the table. Dinner is served.
We know what imperatives are, it’s the do it now, These are
verbs with an exclamation point. And so if worship is a verb,
it’s something for us that we are to do, these are often imperatives. Now, if you look throughout the
rest of the Old Testament, maybe through a lot of other Psalms,
you’ll bump into a lot of other worship verbs, like bow down,
serve, kneel down, declare, say. extol, bend over, sing, worship,
ascribe. There are all kinds of worship
words or worship verbs in the Bible. And so it leads us to
see this, if worship is a verb, if God made us to worship him
and he calls us to worship him, worship is a verb, it means we’re
gonna be busy in church, right? It’s gonna be lots of action,
lots of things for us to do in church. Now, some of you might
like to go to the theater. Some of you might like to go
to the movie theater, and others might like to go to see real
live plays. And in those situations, you are the audience, and there
are actors on the stage, and they’re doing the work. And you’re
participating, you’re allowing them to entertain you. And sadly,
the church has turned that way. We have let people entertain
us. But God, if you think about worship
throughout the centuries and the way architecture has been,
churches have been built to be a meeting house where God meets
with his people. And he meets with his people,
he speaks to them through his mediator, through his minister,
and God meets with his people and they speak. and respond to
him as he speaks and responds. It’s a back and forth dialogue
and so oftentimes you’ve seen in old church architecture, it
was called a meeting house where the people of God met with God. Now sadly, like our downtown
auditoriums and places where theater takes place, You are
the audience and the actors are on the stage giving a production. But when we come to church, it
should be different. For God is the audience. And the stage
is, well, or the place where he sits is really unseen. It’s
in the heavenly places. It’s behind the curtains of heaven. And we are the actors. We are
the performers. And so in the sanctuary, when
we gather for worship, we are led to look heavenward and to
worship the living and true God, and we’re to come, we’re to sing,
we’re to pray, we’re to hear, we’re to respond, we’re to give.
Sometimes we’re to sit in silence. It’s not passive, but God is
revealed and we respond, and it takes effort, it takes preparation,
and it takes focus to tell God that he’s worthy, to tell God
that he’s great, and to sing, pray, and to participate in the
life of worship. Think for just a moment about
what it is biblically to not give God. of the glory due his
name. We heard just a little bit ago
as we recited the commandments. We’re not to take God’s name
in vain. We’re to give him the glory that
is due his name. And so when we don’t worship,
in a sense, it is blasphemous. It is withholding the glory that
is due him. And so worship is a verb. Worship
is action. And it is action that God calls
us to, but it’s action he requires of us. So worship is a verb. The second thing that we need
to understand about worship is it is for God. It’s been, gosh, 16, 17 years
ago now, I was examined for Presbytery by a committee and I was being
examined with the young man who had come here to be an associate
pastor, and I was being examined by a group of men, and one of
the men in that group was a man who had been an associate pastor
here years before that. It’s interesting, the connection.
But the man who used to be an associate pastor here years ago
asked me this question in front of the committee. He just simply
asked this, who is worship for? Well, I knew the answer. I knew
the right answer was worship is for God. But I knew it could
be the wrong answer too, because worship is for us, right? We
come and we’re edified. We come and we’re encouraged.
We come and we’re strengthened. We come and we get something
out of worship very often. But the real answer, the answer
he was looking for was this, worship is for God. And the reason
he asked that question, and he was trying to root out young
ministers, who make man-centered worship a priority. I thought
I knew what he was doing, and so I very sheepishly said, worship
is for God. And he said, that’s right, that’s
what we’re looking for. But it was a trick question in
some sense. But worship is for God, he is
the audience. We need to think about that,
don’t we? When we come into worship, who is the audience? We think
it’s us. We wanna sing songs that do something for us. We
want to have our emotional triggers triggered. We want to have something
happen to us. And in a sense, that’s good. It does take place. But worship
is for God. He is the audience. He is the
target audience. For we were created to glorify
God and to enjoy him, both in this life and the life that is
to come. Notice in Psalm 100, who worship
is directed towards. Four times, it’s to the Lord.
Nine times, it’s directed to him or his. And one time each,
it speaks of he or him. Notice the direction, not just
of Psalm 100, but it’s been true of all the Psalms we’ve looked
at. They are God-centered. They are God-word. And so that’s
something good for us to remember and to emphasize, the direction
of our worship. is toward God. We do get benefits
for sure, but he is the audience. In Romans chapter one, the apostle
Paul says that because of sin, worship, worship was towards
the created and not towards the creator. So we worship ourselves
in sin. We worship our stuff in sin.
We worship ideas. We worship our job. We worship
sports. We worship all kinds of other things. And nowadays
we come into church in America and a lot of that paganistic
worship attitude has seeped into the church. Church culture has
switched God from being the audience to the congregation being the
audience. And I think somewhere along maybe
in the last century that took place when we saw the rise of
revivals and we saw the rise of getting singing groups and
getting, you know, a couple hundred member choirs at these rallies
and the church said, boy, that’s really great, let’s get that
in the church. And so you began to see churches
and their architecture move from meeting houses where there was
a congregation and there was a pulpit. You go in some churches
now and the choir loft is way bigger than the number of seats
in the congregation. Our church that we last served
was able to purchase and redo a building. And one of the things
we had to do, it cost the most money in repairing the sanctuary,
is we had to hire a man with a jackhammer on a bobcat to take
out the stage. because we wanted it pushed way
way back and put a pulpit there. But they had this whole stage
that came out and it had more room for people than the congregation
had seats. And you see how our architecture
in the church gets backwards. It gets backwards, and so the
congregation becomes the audience. And church is like a concert. It’s a feeling. It’s an experience.
And it’s very often targeted towards various groups and what
they like and what are their preferences. Well, remember that
happened one time before, and that was at the foot of Mount
Sinai when Moses was meeting with God. And he heard the sound
of a cry from up on the mountain. And he thought for sure it was
the sound of the cry of war. But when he went down to investigate,
they had taken all their gold and they had fashioned a calf.
And Aaron said, this is the God who brought you out of Egypt,
out of the land of slavery, worship. And he found all these people
gathered around this golden calf. and worshiping. And so we have
to be very careful that we understand our worship is directed towards
God and it’s not towards us or our preferences. And so we have
to correct when the world seeps in and understand worship is
for God. God is the audience. We come in humility and we worship
him. We come in submission. We come
with surrender. We come into the Lord’s house
with a heart and mind prepared, ready to give it our best effort. The other thing we have to remember,
though, in this idea of worship is it’s a privilege. The world
was created, mankind fell in sin, and worship is now part
of the work of redemption. God has made it possible for
us to enter into his presence. Remember Adam and Eve, they lost
communion with God. They lost fellowship with God.
They were removed from God’s presence, removed from the garden.
And the only access to God that we have now is through a mediator.
And that is through Christ Jesus, his perfect obedience, his death
of deaths, his rising from the dead, his putting away of sin
and appearing before the Father on our behalf in heaven. So fellowship
has been restored with God through Christ. And so when we worship
God and it requires our action, when we worship God and it is
for him, we need to remember it is through a mediator. It
is through the work. of the Lord Jesus Christ, and
think of it this way. It’s a privilege to have access
to God, and in a sense, we have season tickets to the presence
of God. Some of you wish maybe you had
season tickets to your favorite sports team. You could have access,
you would get a seat, you could gain entry. Well, you have access
every week into God’s presence, and it’s an unlimited pass. Your
tickets will never expire, and it’s because of Christ. And for
those who know him and love him and walk with him, we have eternal
access to almighty God. It is he who made us and we are
his. We are his people, the sheep
of his pasture. And so the sheep of the shepherd. the sheep of the good shepherd
come into his presence because the good shepherd of the sheep
has died for us. So worship is a verb, requires
action. Worship is for God. The last
thing I want us to think about from this passage is worship
requires all of you. Now, I don’t mean all y’all,
right? That’s the Southernism. It does.
It’s good for us to all come to church. But worship requires
everything by which God has made us. So I’ll explain it this way. A couple weeks ago, some of us
went home and watched the Super Bowl. We’re devoted fans, every
bit of us was engaged in the game. Maybe some of you last
night watched the big Duke Carolina rivalry, you watched it a few
weeks ago. Up in Michigan last night and a few weeks ago, there
was the big Michigan State rivalry. And you know these fans, they
show up and every bit of them is engaged and ready for the
big game. They’re into it with voice, with
body, with emotion. They’re prepared, they’ve got
their popcorn, their chips. If you went into Harris Teeter
last night, like I did about 5.30, everybody was getting their
stuff ready for the big game. You get your t-shirts on, you
get your tailgate parties all set, you get ready for hours
ahead, you give your devoted attention, you get ready for
this. How often do we get ready for
church like this though? If worship requires all of us,
all of our being, We get ready for the Lord’s Day worship. We
are devoted saints. Every fiber of our being, all
of us, our mind, our heart, and our bodies ought to be ready
for worship. And think about the words of
Psalm 100, come. It means you gotta show up, right? It means you gotta get there.
Bring your body to church. Another word in Psalm 100 is
know. You’ve got to bring your mind to church. Know that the
Lord, He is God. It is He who has made us. We are His. How else do we come? We come joyfully. We come filled
with the fruit of the Holy Spirit. We come excited, full of joy.
We come with gladness. We come with singing. We come
to bow down. And so we show up to worship
with every bit of our body, every bit of our, makeup, the way we
have been made, body, soul, and spirit. We show up having had
a week of worship in the world, having a list of thanksgiving,
knowledge of God and his perfections, a grasp of his redemptive work. We take cues from the bulletin.
We take cues from the minister. We take cues from our hymnals
and those helping us in worship and our minds and our hearts
and our imaginations and our wills. with the Holy Spirit at
work and Christ offering up our songs, our prayers, our emotions,
our silences, our confessions. They rise up to God and we pray
that he is pleased. When I was in college, I think
the first class I went to was an English literature class and
the professor said to us this, if you are in my class and you’re
bored, I’ll take half the responsibility. But he said, I want you to take
the other half. He says, I’ll make class interesting,
you do the reading. And he was right. If we had read
our books and our stories and we showed up prepared, he could
make it very interesting. And that’s a little sense of
the way church ought to go. Sometimes you hear people say,
well, I went to church today and there was just nothing for
me. And I want to say to that person, and maybe sometimes I
do, you didn’t show up. prepared. You didn’t show up
ready. You didn’t show up and bring
anything to the table and there’s a little reason why we send out
on Wednesdays, I guess it is, we send out a newsletter. And
usually attached to the newsletter, if you get the email, it has
both bulletins. And if you get the envelope in the mail, it
has both bulletins in that envelope. And I see some people, they show
up with their bulletin already. I see some, they show up with
their hymnals marked, their Bibles marked. You can tell that it’s
helped them prepare. One of the reasons we do that is not to
help the people in the tree and paper business and the postal
service. We do that to help you prepare
to worship. If we’re gonna take half the
responsibility for getting ready for church and you take the other
half, the reason we send that out is so you’ll be ready. Read
the passage to be preached that day. Read through the hymns.
Think about their theology. Look over it with your family.
If you have a hymnal that you use and bring yourself, come
with it marked. On some Sundays I see some folks, they come a
few minutes early, they sit down and they take the extra offering
envelopes and the pew racks and they mark their hymnal. It’s
easier to, spin the pages, do practical things like that. We’ll
do everything we can to make worship interesting and engaging
and to help you meet with Almighty God. when the Lord Jesus was
an adult, when he was growing up and his family would go to
Jerusalem, they would ascend up to Jerusalem and they would
sing the festal songs, the gathering songs, the Psalms 120, I think
in a few minutes we’ll sing Psalm 122, but they would go up to
Jerusalem singing and on the way as they sang, They were preparing
their hearts. They were preparing to worship
the living and true God. And in a sense, these are like
tailgating songs. You’re traveling to the game.
You’re excited about your team. You’re looking forward to the
big event. You’re joyful. You’re prepared. Your cooler
is packed. Your food is laid out. Well, in Jesus’ day, they
would do this for days as they marched up to Jerusalem to worship. Isn’t that interesting as we
think about the Lord’s Day? How often do we maybe lay our
clothes out on Sunday nights or Saturday nights? How often
do we get our Bibles out and know where they are? Sunday sometimes
can be the devil’s best day. He gets the family in a little
squabble before church. He gets us up late and grouchy
and unprepared. We can’t find our Bibles. We
can’t find our things we need for church. Maybe it’s a good
encouragement for us to get ready so that we can get the most out
of the Lord’s day and be better prepared and better ready. I wanna end by us thinking about
verse five. It says, for the Lord is good.
If you know God as your creator, if you know God as your redeemer,
if you have the Holy Spirit in you as life giver, you have something
to come to church and to shout about before the face of God
who desires to be worshiped. Let’s say a prayer together.
Our gracious God, we thank you that you teach us in your word
about worship, about what you want, but also how we ought to
be prepared, heart and mind and soul. So help us to think on
these things, to be ready to come to church and to take action,
to worship you and to do it through the precious Redeemer, the Lord
Jesus. Hear us and help us, we pray in Christ’s name. Amen.